This article is a preliminary SWTOR guide that explains details and some background about the game. Star Wars the Old Republic is a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game) by Bioware and LucasArts which is based on the popular big screen film, Star Wars by LucasFilms.

The storyline is driven by the original theme, the never-ending conflict between the Sith Empire and the Galactic Republic. The entire SWTOR story occurs in the time before Dark Vader and Luke Skywalker. SWTOR is all about choosing an alliance a class to play and battling your way through missions and the vast galaxy with your allies.

The game offers unique features including space combat, the availability of crew skills and entire starships to manage. Fans of the movie will be able to experience everything they love about Star Wars first hand, from the cute beeping of R2D2 and his fellow C2PO, encountering familiar races and of course the black market. The available classes are also all derived from characters created in George Lucas’ Star Wars. The known available classes would of course include the popular Jedi. So far, there are eight known classes which are the Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Trooper, Bounty Hunter, Imperial Agent, Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor and the Smuggler class played by Harrison Ford as Hans Solo in the film.

As the story has it, the Galactic Republic’s main mission is to maintain peace and protect the people of the republic. The Republic’s protectors are the SWTOR Jedi Knights of the Jedi order. The other powerful opposing force in Star Wars: the Old Republic is the Sith Empire. Lead by the Dark Emperor, the Empire’s main objective is destroying the Republic and gaining complete power.

The game not only features high tech SWTOR starships to player’s enjoyment, but there are vast planets to explore and land on as well. Known planets so are are: Tython (the Jedi’s home), Korriban, Hutta, Ord Mantell, Coruscant, Balmorra, Alderaan, Tatooine, Dromundkaas, Taris, Belsavis, Voss, Hoth, Nar Shaddaa, Corellia, Ilum and Quesh. With that many number of planets, imagine just how large a game SWTOR is. Well folks, that’s it for our introductory SWTOR guide. Stay tuned for more details and guides about SWTOR that will be made available here at SWTORGuide.net.

This article is a good starting point to learn about Smuggler Skills & Progression. Check out this SWTOR Smuggler Guide for more advanced details, insights and gameplay tactics.

Finally the hour has come for all Star Wars: The Old Republic fans. The wait was finally over last Friday as players were waiting for new updates.Revealed last Friday was the progression of the SWTOR Smuggler Class. View the video below and see if you can pick up some of the Smugglers abilities and armor sets. Watch how the Smuggler plays fights using misdirection and various other forms to enable sucker punches. Also see how the Smugglers are the master of the dual blasters.

Fans of SWTOR now have a slight glimpse of joy as Frank Gibeau as now they know that the release of this huge MMO will be tied closely with the Beta. With 2 million people signed up for the beta and even though pre-order sales have shot through EA’s pre-order records, there is still a lot that can go wrong in an MMO launch. If you recall previous MMOs in the past like WOW and other MMOs, their launch caused a massive server problem trying to uphold the millions of players.

“We’re driving towards a date, but… [we] …want to make sure that these services can last a decade… It is definitely tied to the beta test feedback that’s ongoing and so far, so good. We feel good about the date that we’re heading towards but you’re right, you could have a Crazy Ivan show up in the September/October beta test and be like, ‘wow, I’ve got to fix that’.”

“The other thing is, the technology of standing these things up and then getting all the server farms to work together, talk to one another, store character records… it’s extraordinarily complex and so we want a very stable experience.”

“We don’t want to happen to us what happened to WoW and a couple of other services where in the first week there were queues trying to get on to the servers, the entire service crashed — we don’t want that to happen. So we need to nail and make sure that it’s up 24/7 and [that] it’s high quality.”

In summary, the rumors heard a few months ago through EA’s marketing distribution has led us to believe that we are in the plans for something very big and that Bioware is not in a hurry to get there. All in all, game release will depend mainly on Beta testers on their feedback, so if you are one of them, feel free to share your stories here so we can get an indication if the game might be on time or pushed back.

A SWTOR rep at Gamescon revealed plans that EA would limit the game supply right at launch date. The purpose of this move is not a marketing move to create an illusion of the game being more popular that it already is. If you rewind back in the past, I think Nintendo was accused of using this strategy with the Wii. Anyhow, the rep at Gamescom says this move is made to avoid server instability, something that all MMOs face during the launch of the game where there are just to many players for the server to handle. This will seem to be the case considering the SWTOR pre-order numbers. The rep also goes to say that it plans to limit copies both at retail and digitally. Apparently no figure as to the maximum number was given but the rep did mention that once the number is reached, digital sales will be the first to be cut off while EA will try to increase its server capacity before allowing more players in the game.

EA is able to limit or pause digital sales is due to the fact that all digital SWTOR copes will be available exclusively through its own Origin shop, therefore making the process relatively simple.
The rep says that game publishers are willing to do this as they are more interested in players having a great and smooth experience rather than sell the game to as many people as possible.

Relating to the statement above, EA’s Frank Gibeau talked about increasing its server capacity to allow millions of players if needed, he described his plan as an “aggressive plan”.

“We’re pretty relaxed about what we’re going to be able to achieve there. We’ll be able to scale up and light up new severs on a fairly quick basis. We’ve got a plan to do that over the months following ship, and we’ve got a lot of capacity built into that,” says Frank.

He went as far as to say that it would only take half a million subscribers for SWTOR to be profitable.“And anything north of a million, as we approach a million and a half or two, starts to look like a great investment, and justifies the entire purchase price… of BioWare in a very positive way,“ he said.

According to many statements, it seems reassuring to know that EA is going to ensure a great gaming experience and hopefully will not face any problems at launch. Bioware is aiming to have the game out this year, but still no release date has been mentioned yet. If worst comes to worst and the game is not released this year, it should be out in early 2012. Those who have already made a SWTOR pre-order will get to play ahead of time.